Tuesday, October 18, 2011

I came across a blog in which someone had made a comment referring to my "Venus: No Greenhouse Effect" post (Nov. 22, 2010), and the blog author and others made a series of disparaging comments about it, all quite scientifically incompetent. I submitted a long comment of my own to clear up the science, but I checked back later to find my comment had been ignored, and despite someone coming to my defense, the disparagement continued. The site had 82 comments when I last looked (my comment would have been 81 if it had been accepted). For followers of my position on the greenhouse effect hypothesis, the following is the comment I submitted there (you may want to find the earlier comments, in Swedish, to which I was trying to reply--I used google translate to understand them myself):

"1) I am not an engineer, I am a physicist. I don't call myself a genius, only a competent physical scientist. This is a most important point (see point 7 below).

2) The greenhouse effect is not a warming of the planetary surface due to carbon dioxide or other "greenhouse gases" in the atmosphere. It is an INCREASE in the atmospheric temperature due to an INCREASE in atmospheric carbon dioxide or other IR-active gases (water, methane, etc.). It is explained by consensus climate scientists as due to absorption of infrared radiation from the surface, with subsequent backradiation back to the surface, thus slowing heat loss. The consensus is incompetent, however, and their greenhouse effect does not exist, as my Venus/Earth comparison definitively shows.

3) I have not ignored albedo; instead, I have shown that there is no albedo effect, because the atmosphere is fundamentally warmed by direct absorption of incident solar infrared radiation, not by a previously warmed planetary surface. Specifically,

4) The Venus atmospheric temperature, at any given pressure over the range of Earth tropospheric pressures, is just 17% higher than the Earth atmospheric temperature at the same pressure. Outside of the thick cloud layer on Venus, the ratio of temperatures, Venus/Earth, is very precisely 1.176, and this is due, again precisely, to the ratio of the two planets' distances from the Sun, and nothing else. This is because the 1.176 temperature ratio corresponds to a 1.91 power ratio in the solar radiation received by the two planets (1.176 = fourth-root of 1.91), which is just the actual power ratio incident on the two planets. Thus, even though the clouds of Venus reflect much of the visible solar radiation, Venus's atmosphere is still warmed by 1.91 times the power per unit area as is Earth's atmosphere. This of course means (to a competent physicist like myself), that the atmospheres of Earth and Venus are not warmed by the visible portion of the solar spectrum--in the troposphere, the atmosphere is warmed by infrared absorption. Since the actual Venus/Earth temperature ratio is due solely to the ratio of their distances from the Sun, both atmospheres must absorb the SAME PORTION of the Sun's infrared radiation. That is a definitive finding for the correction of climate science: Even with its much higher albedo, Venus's atmosphere is still warmed by the 1.91 greater power expected solely from its closer distance from the Sun.

5) There is no albedo effect upon the Venus/Earth temperature ratio, precisely because the atmospheres are warmed by incident solar infrared radiation, not from the ground as most scientists believe.

6) I recommend people read not just my article, "Venus: No Greenhouse Effect", but the comments following it, which go into the above points, and more.

7) Those who refuse to study and understand my article, or having gone through it, dismiss it on any physical grounds, especially a supposed albedo effect, are, in contrast to myself, incompetent as physical scientists. It is, as I have written in my article, both a student-level analysis and the definitive correction of the incompetent consensus. This includes Judith Curry, Jo Nova, and the other so-called "lukewarm" believers in the consensus greenhouse effect, as well as the alarmist climate scientists and their defenders. My Venus/Earth analysis separates the competent physical scientists from the incompetent ones, on the subject of the greenhouse effect. I do not say that haughtily, I say that as a scientist who knows what he is talking about. My analysis should have been done by James Hansen and others back in October 1991, when the Venus data was obtained by the Magellan spacecraft, and the greenhouse effect dropped as wrong back then. That is how incompetent the climate consensus really is."